Coach Jeff Grant's Digest - Issue #10

My digest is a collection of inspirational and instructional resources I find interesting and wish to share, including my latest content. To save you time, I pen a quick preview & highlight the key parts to check out.

Four articles and a fun video for you this week. The common theme threads its way through each piece, but not always so obviously, at first glance. It’s self-reliance – in thoughts, actions, and reactions. I won’t hold you up – the articles are good, so go ahead and jump into them!

EXCELLENT article: it’s well worth 5min to read it all. Too many gems to share, but one that popped right away is this: “Succeeding over the long term has far more to do with stepping back and subtracting distractions, rather than voraciously pushing forward. The latter is how you burn out.”

As you can imagine, I’m a strong proponent of every topic in this title! There’s one sentence in this piece that really popped for me .. it’s this one, on the topic of meditation: “Over time, the spaces between each thought can become more vast until maybe one day, little to no thinking has the potential to result.” That’s a beautiful and clear expression of a practical aim in meditation – to create space between thoughts.

The part of this article that caught my attention is on designing a flow-inducing work environment, thus owning the way you work. This means having the awareness of when you are most commonly in flow, that is, in your peak performance state mentally, and then doing all you can to ensure that flow-crushing activities (e.g. meetings, calls, etc.) are barred from that time. Align that with flow-inducing fitness activities and you have a double boost for your mental power. Easy? No. Worth it? Yes.

And now for something FUN! My good friend Chrigu and I filmed this entertaining video to promote our upcoming Victory Garden WOD, an event open to all around the world to support our project with Face-to-Face in Malawi. It’s about self-reliance too!

Personal Update

In January, I filmed this video on a cold day at the track, where I was at the start of my comeback training, working hard to return to racing after an 8-year gap. On April 9th, I honored my commitment and finished the Zurich Marathon.

I’ve run lots of marathons over the years, starting with my first in 1996. I pref trail ultras to road marathons, but I grabbed on to this road race as a target to fire up my winter training and as a milestone re-entry event.

Race day was a HOT (very unusual for early April in Zurich). I went out at the optimistic end of my speed for this comeback year and managed to hang on to a quick pace for 30KM before the wheels came off and the battle with muscle cramps began.

When I stretched my quads, my hamstrings would cramp…when I stretched my hams, my quads would lock. This awkward ballet of walk-run-cramp-stetch-crumble to the ground is funny in hindsight, but a gut punch in the moment. I never would have thought to carry salt tabs on an April race in Switzerland. Lesson learned!

I made it to the finish nearly 90 minutes slower than my personal best, but happy to finish this comeback milestone and have a fun day in the sun.

During the race, especially after the real struggle began, I thought about the “7 Ways..” article above and the author’s guidance that people often give up because “they want the outcome more than they want to obtain a skill.”

With 12KM to go, my temptation was to obsess about crossing the finish line, but I reframed it and instead focused intensely on those frustrating moments of challenge – as experiencing and enduring those moments are what we learn and grow from – not the easy moment of receiving a race medal. Remember that the next time you’re in the middle of a tough moment – embrace it for all the lessons you can draw from it, and keep on going!